htaccess redirect domain root, but not /#AnchorName

Question

I'm trying desperately to figure out how to redirect root only, without redirecting (literally) anything after the slash / (including anchors #).

I have a landing page I'd like to redirect all domainname.com traffic too, but also need to let people enter the main site by using deep links like domainname.com/store, domainname.com/#about, or domainname.com/#up (the main page & Nav use anchors).

Code I'm using is below and results are:
- redirects domainname.com > landingpage.domainname.com (GOOD)
- does not redirect domainname.com/store (GOOD)
- redirects domainname.com/#about > landingpage.domainname.com/#about (BAD - THIS IS THE PROBLEM)

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?domainname\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^$ http://landingpage.domainname.com [L,NC,R=301]

Thanks,

James

Answer 1

James

do you have the option of removing your resources from domain.com/store to sub.domain.com/store? It seems like you'll be doing a huge amount of redirecting, which will become unwieldy over time.

Anyways, I would just rewrite the domain.com requests, and leave all the others alone.

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^ http://www.example.com [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://sub.example.com/ $1 [R=301,L]

Answer 2

You can't use htaccess to do this, because the #about part of the URL is never sent to the server , and if it's never sent to the server, all apache and mod_rewrite sees is / , without the #about . The #about is a URL fragment and stays strictly on the browser's side. There's no way to prevent this redirect using mod_rewrite.

Therefore, you'll have to write javascript to do the redirect instead and get rid of the redirect in your htaccess file.

<script language=”javascript” type=”text/javascript”>
if(window.location.hostname != "landingpage.domainname.com" &&  // check that hostname isn't landingpage
   !window.location.hash &&  // check that there is no fragment
   window.location.pathname == "/") {   
  window.location = "http://landingpage.domainname.com/";
}
</script>